All Souls

The Narthex for All Souls began somber, even almost a little threatening, but ended in rejoicing, in a switch from the black robe to the white, the lights bright, the reminder, and I willl rasie you up, and I will raise you up and I will raise you up on the last day. The mystery of All Souls is the mystery of the Cross, all of our living and dying is taken up in that, so at the end of the night, we raise and eat bread and wine, uniting us not only to the Sacred Resurrection, but the Sacred Dying as well.

This is such a strange time of the year. The world is beautiful in its dying. The trees are red as they pass into sleeping and there is a good chill in the air as we head toward winter. The year begins, magic begins,we remember the timewhen many of our vocatiosn begun and yet this is a time of ending. This dying and rising ending and beginning is a great mystery, one we have taken to ourselves. Christ is not born in the spring--though apparently for some he was--he is born in the darkness of the dead winter. The gloom is the home of birth, not its enemy. We cannot have one without the other. John the baptist is born at he height of summer, but the deepest matter is born from the dark and cold of winter.

In this path, so often what we are about is re enchanting ourselves and unlearning lessons we have been taught that are not worth learning. And then, on the other hand we are learning how to take back the babies thrown out with the bathwater. Some of this has to do with the religions we were brought up in, but not all of it. One for instance is the idea that a holiday occurs on one time on one day, that we must cram everything into a particualr twenty four hour period. The time of All Hallows, alternately called Allentide, Samhaine and All Hallows perfectly illustraites this, its high days stretching across Samhaine (Halloween) Hallowmas (All Saints and the following day of All Souls) And all of these days are interchangable, not just a progression of celebrating one thing or another, but a constant moving back and forth in a celebration of the other world, the fairies, the lost souls, the ancestors, the saints and much much more.